CARS ELICIT a wide range of feelings: the pleasures of driving, the outburst of 'road rage', the thrill of speed, the security engendered by driving a 'safe' car and so on. They also generate intensely emotional politics in which some people passionately mobilize to 'stop the traffic' and 'reclaim the streets', while others vociferously defend their right to cheap petrol. Cars are above all machines that move people, but they do so in many senses of the word. Recent approaches to the phenomenology of caruse have highlighted 'the driving body' as a set of social practices, embodied dispositions, and physical affordances (Sheller and Urry, 2000; Dant and Martin, 2001; Edensor, 2002; Oldrup, 2004; Dant, 2004; Thrift, 2004). More encompassing approaches to the anthropology of material cultures have also resituated the car as a social-technical 'hybrid' (Michael, 2001; Miller, 2001a).(1) This article builds both on this work and on recent approaches in the sociology of emotions (Hochschild, 1983, 1997, 2003; Bendelow and Williams, 1998; Katz, 2000; Goodwin et al., 2001; Ahmed, 2004) to explore the ways in which the 'dominant culture of automobility' (Urry, 2000) is implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling, in which emotions and the senses play a key part. Social commentators have long addressed the problem of car cultures in an explicitly normative manner concerned with the restitution of 'public goods' (the environment, human health, the social fabric of cities, democratic public cultures) that have been eroded by contemporary car and road systems (Jacobs, 1961; Nader, 1965; Sennett, 1990; Kunstler, 1994; Dunn, 1998). At stake in such debates is not simply the future of the car, but the future of the entire 'car culture' (and wider transportation system) in what might be characterized as 'societies of automobility' in which the 'coercive freedom' of driving shapes both public and private spaces of all scales and kinds (Sheller and Urry, 2000; Urry, 2004). Yet most practical efforts at promoting more 'ethical' forms of car consumption have been debated and implemented as if the intense feelings, passions and embodied experiences associated with automobility were not relevant. Car cultures have social, material and above all affective dimensions that are overlooked in current strategies to influence car-driving decisions. The individualistic 'rational choice' model, which is so influential as to be taken for granted in transportation policy debates, distorts our understanding of how people (and their feelings) are embedded in historically sedimented and geographically etched patterns of 'quotidian mobility' (Kaufman, 2000). Paying attention to the emotional constituents of car cultures, however, need not imply resorting to black-box causal explanations such as the popular yet ill-defined notions of 'automobile addiction' or a 'love affair' with the car (Motavalli, 2001). New approaches both to car cultures and to emotional cultures can aid us in shifting attention away from the counter-factual 'rational actor' who supposedly makes carefully reasoned economic choices, and towards the lived experience of dwelling with cars in all of its complexity, ambiguity and contradiction. Car consumption is never simply about rational economic choices, but is as much about aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses to driving, as well as patterns of kinship, sociability, habitation and work. Insofar as there are 'car cultures' vested in an 'Intimate relationship between cars and people' (Miller, 2001b: 17), we can ask how feelings for, of and within cars occur as embodied sensibilities that are socially and culturally embedded in familial and sociable practices of car use, and the circulations and displacements performed by cars, roads and drivers. As Michel Callon and John Law suggest: Agency and subjectivity are not just about calculation and interpretation. They may also have to do with emotion. Circulation and displacement are also crucial here.... Passion, emotion, to be affected, all have to do with travel, with circulation. The language gives it away. To be moved, to be transported, the trip, these are metaphors for displacement. As, too, is addiction, a word that comes from the Latin ad-ducere, to lead away. (2004: 10) As I shall argue below, an emotional agent is a relational entity that instantiates particular aesthetic orientations and kinaesthetic dispositions towards driving. Movement and being moved together produce the feelings of being in the car, for the car and with the car. A better understanding of the cultural and emotional constituents of personal, familial, regional, national and transnational patterns of automobility can contribute to future research programmes and policy initiatives that resist the powerful yet ultimately unsatisfying aggregation of social data based on statistical quantification of individual preferences, attitudes and actions. Social psychological studies of driving behaviour have begun to emphasize the complex determinants of transportational choices, such as architecture' that attend their mobility, but also by 'the children themselves, easily "picked off' by the SUV's higher bumpers and poor visibility' (Jain, 2002: 399), not to mention their now-recognized tendency to roll over in accidents allegedly leading to one in four traffic deaths in the US (Bradsher, 2002). Even if Bradsher's claims have been challenged, SUVs are nevertheless more likely to be accessorized with the rigid metal 'bull bars' which also are frequently fatal to child pedestrians in accidents, even at relatively slow speeds.
